Teepen: Annie forget your gun — Hillary needs a miracle

Hillary Clinton has just about run out of her Annie Oakley moments.

In his musical about the sharpshooter, Irving Berlin had Annie belt out a bragging song aimed at her rival in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show:

"Anything you can be, I can be greater/Sooner or later, I'm greater than you...

"Any note you can hold, I can hold longer/I can hold any note longer than you..."

No, she can't. Not after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. Clinton barely eked out a win in the former, with no delegate gain to show for it, and got skunked in the latter.

A long shot since Super Tuesday, in miracle-needed territory more recently, for Clinton to win the Democratic nomination now the universe would have to be reordered. With each new shortfall, more superdelegates slip to Barack Obama, and the next campaign dollar becomes harder to raise.

Clinton will labor on until a deal can be configured to keep her from turning the party convention into a brawl with folding chairs flying.

Barack Obama may be able to afford spotting her most of Florida's disputed delegates. Party big dogs will probably find a way to help retire her campaign debt.

Some contrivance will have to be created to accommodate Michigan. Like Florida, it mooted itself when it broke the Democratic primary scheduling rules but, unlike Florida, Obama as a result wasn't even on the ballot there. Clinton is beyond brazen in demanding Michigan's delegates.

How very weird has been the last political year. Last summer John McCain was a paupered goner. Obama was a gleam only in his own eye and Clinton was the inevitable nominee.

Looking back, it may have been the Iowa caucuses, right off, that did Clinton in, and not just because she came in third, a suspect showing for the inevitable nominee. Only nine points – 38 percent to 29 – separated Obama and Clinton, with John Edwards logging 30 percent, and there were primaries aplenty to come.

No, it was Clinton's post-caucus rally, where the TV cameras found her sharing the stage with Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madelyn Albright. It was like a haunting. No small number of Democrats who had been comfortable with Clinton as their likely nominee suddenly found their political gut, to their own surprise, all but shouting, "Oh, no. Not again."

Something of a reaction along those lines must worry McCain now. He is even older news than Clinton. Obama is no longer quite the young Lochinvar of recent yore. He has been scuffed up in the primaries, in good part by the double-teaming Hill and Bill.

Still, to an electorate broadly disillusioned by years of stalemated politics and its cast of weary, holdover characters, Obama plays as promise while McCain plays as resignation.

It's pretty much up to Hillary Clinton whether she wants to give Obama a chance to freshen up for the general election or whether she will fatigue him with more of her "any hit you can take, I can give harder" end game.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.